Remembering Darnel, a Forgotten Plant of Literary, Religious and Evolutionary Significance is the title of a paper by Howard Thomas, Jayne Archer and Richard Marggraf Turley, to be published in the Journal of Ethnobiology. The abstract is as follows:

This paper explores the complex interactions between people and the psychotoxic crop contaminant and wheat mimicker, darnel (Lolium temulentum L.). Bringing together knowledge from literary, historical, religious, medical and scientific sources, we trace the ways in which the plant’s cultural story has been informed by its cultivation (accidental and otherwise) by humans. Darnel is a man-made plant that evolved from a perennial progenitor and was subject to the same human-mediated selection pressures as the ancestral cereal species it infested. The toxicity of darnel grains is due to a cocktail of phytochemicals secreted by genetically complex endophytic fungi of the genus Epichloë, closely related to ergot (Claviceps purpurea (Fr.:Fr.) Tul.) We show how darnel’s reputation as a poisonous cereal mimic that corrupts the food-chain made the plant a symbol of malign subversion, notably invoked in crises around religious heterodoxy and political subversion. We consider the ways in which literary allusions, from Shakespeare to Dickens, identified the corrupting influence of darnel with psychological and social breakdown. Darnel is classified as extinct in the United Kingdom and other developed countries with intensive agriculture, and its significance as a food chain contaminant and literary and religious symbol is vanishing from experience and understanding. This paper, then, is intended to serve as a textual seed bank to collect darnel’s cultural traces, and to demonstrate the ways in which the plant has annotated key debates and moments of crisis in human history.

Here’s the abstract of a chapter to be included in the forthcoming volume titled Literature and Sustainability (eds L Squire, A Johns-Putra, J Parham) Manchester: University Press.H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley, J E Archer. 2015. The millers’ tales: sustainability, the arts and the watermill.

In the relationship between the arts and sustainability, the watermill is important, but often neglected. Frequently sentimentalized and abstracted from its historical moment, the watermill was the point at which food entered most transparently and immediately into the world of politics and governance. It was a complex institution within which communities were created and negotiated, through cultural as well as material relationships. The present essay tells the stories of four watermills, actual and (re-)imagined: Trumpington Mill in Cambridgeshire, setting for Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale (c.1390); Flatford Mill in East Anglia, often associated with John Constable’s 1821 painting now known as ‘The Hay Wain’; Dorlcote Mill, home to the Tulliver family in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860); and Felin Ganol in Llanrhystud, Ceredigion, a building with medieval origins and recently restored to working order by the owners. The stories of these watermills, their loss and recovery, mediates important (sometimes inconvenient) truths about our fraught relationship with the land and remind us of the central role of the creative arts in reimagining alternative, more sustainable interconnections between land, water and communities and the food chain they support.

A new publication: Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley, Howard Thomas. 2015. “Moving accidents by flood and field”: The Arable and Tidal Worlds of George Eliot’sThe Mill on the Floss.  English Literary History  82: 701-728.

Abstract:

The Mill on the Floss is often regarded as a pastoral work. In fact, arable landscape informs the language, themes and events of George Eliot’s novel. This essay recovers the original agri-environmental world described by Eliot and shows how the lives of the Tullivers and the fate of Dorlcote Mill are driven by the complex interaction of arable and tidal forces. Eliot’s meticulous research into these arable and tidal worlds is reconstructed and it is argued that in this work the novelist reflects on the impact of free market economics on food production and distribution, on agricultural livings and rural communities and on river and land management across Britain.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=%2Fjournals%2Felh%2Fv082%2F82.2.archer.html

Here’s a video of Richard’s presentation at the 31st Chaos Communication Congress, Hamburg, 29 December 2014.

It’s also now on YouTube.

Coincident with the publication of our book, Food and the Literary Imagination, Jane Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas just submitted a new essay for publication on the subject of darnel (more of this article in a subsequent post). Our new thoughts on the history and significance of this fascinating plant include insights into food preferences and behaviour in the 19^th century, the sower parables in the Gospel of Matthew, the genetics and chemistry of darnel’s psychoactive constituents and the occurrence of Darnel(l) and its variants as given and family names. While researching this article, we came upon a cache of beautiful photographs by Franco Caldararo, that show very clearly why darnel grain is so temptingly cereal-like, and how it blushes with the same phenolic pigments as red wheat. Sig Caldararo is clearly a gifted photographer of plants, but is extremely elusive – we have not been able to find contact details for him. We should be grateful to hear from anyone who can tell us more about him. Here is the link to Caldararo’s darnel images: http://luirig.altervista.org/naturaitaliana/viewpics.php?title=Lolium+temulentum

Here’s a press release issued by Aberystwyth University announcing publication of FLI: http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2Fq3zq4jq&h=PAQGEAeBV 

Publication of Food and the Literary Imagination is imminent. Details are given on the website of the publisher, Palgrave: http://tinyurl.com/mta3ocm

Food and the Literary Imagination (or FLI, as we call it for brevity’s sake) went to press at the beginning of September 2014. It should be published before the end of this year. Here’s a brief synopsis:

Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas: Food and the Literary Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2014)

People, international agencies and governments are increasingly concerned about the nature of our food, where it comes from, and the conditions in which it is produced. By close reading of a wide sweep of historical literature, including works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and George Eliot, FLI shows that such anxieties are nothing new, and that we are not confronting them alone. Too often, we engage with our rural, worked environments through the lens of apparently sentimental and incidental literary representations. The book recovers lost understandings of the materiality of life and sustenance for the authors and their first readers.

In a previous blog, Jayne Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Sid Thomas described how a transdisciplinary reading of King Lear turned out to be a productive route towards understanding Shakespeare’s influences and ways in which his response to and representation of food (in)security might shed light on similar challenges we face today. Could this approach be more generally applicable to literature of other ages? To answer this question, we turned to Richard’s specialty, nineteenth-century Romanticism, and in particular the poetry of Keats.

This time we added a new device to our cross-cultural toolkit of approaches – the Field Trip. We visited Winchester and retraced the steps that led Keats to the composition of one of the nation’s favourite poems, the ode ‘To Autumn’. Once again, bringing the transdisciplinary eye to bear, we were able to recover lost memories and understanding, even locating the long-misidentified field of the poem under a multistorey carpark. And once more, there were scholarly publications, conference presentations, media interest bordering on the viral (for example, this article from the Daily Telegraph), and an OUP blog.

Richard stands before the possible site of Keats’s lodgings in Market Street, Winchester

By now we were beginning to see a theme of historical and contemporary significance emerging, a thread running through the canon of English literature that our approach could identify and articulate. To date, we have further turned our attention to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, the history of fields and mills and the fragility of the food chain. This research is presented in articles in two academic journals (Chaucer Review and English Literary History), both in press.

An honest miller was so unusual that they named an inn for him (1940s inn sign from ‘The Honest Miller’, Brook, Kent – built 1609)

During our journey through the literary canon a clear narrative emerged, centred on the food chain as an evolutionary and cultural repository and a medium for the transmission of nourishment, creativity and information. Writers have always responded imaginatively to the demands of the belly. We have addressed what Jonathan Safran Foer, in Eating Animals, calls ‘the terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love’ intrinsic to sustenance, in our forthcoming book: Food and the Literary Imagination by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Publications on Keats, Chaucer and Eliot

J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2014. “Soper at oure aller cost”: the politics of food supply in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer Review (in press)

JE Archer, H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley. 2014. “Moving accidents by flood and field”: the arable and tidal worlds of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. English Literary History (in press)

R Marggraf Turley, JE Archer, H Thomas. 2012. On St Giles Hill. Keats’s Ode ‘to Autumn’ in the Market. Times Literary Supplement No. 5723 (5 December 2012) pp 14-15

R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas, JE Archer. 2012. Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester. Review of English Studies 63: 797-817

We are Jayne Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Sid Thomas. Since about 2007 we have been discussing, arguing, researching, lecturing, writing and publishing together about literature, sustenance and dearth. By way of an introduction to our new blog, here’s the story of how our association came about.

It began, as many good things do, with a conversation in the pub. Richard and Sid, having been recently introduced, were explaining the day job to each other (literary scholar and plant scientist respectively). The dialogue turned to plants and literature, and the subject of the cause of King Lear’s madness came up. Some ideas began to form – but were they just pub ideas and would they have any value beyond closing time?

What was needed was an expert on Shakespeare and early modern food, diet and medicine, which just happened to describe Richard’s colleague Jayne. A couple of days after the encounter in the pub, all three of us met over coffee. Jayne reassured Richard and Sid that their beer-fuelled conversation might indeed have stumbled on a novel insight into Shakespeare’s times and experiences. As we talked this over, it soon became clear that we had the makings of productive alchemy through blending the distinctive academic viewpoints of an early modernist, a Romanticist and a Geneticist.

Our backgrounds turned out to be highly complementary and compatible:

Jayne Elisabeth Archer is a Lecturer in the Department of Performing Arts and English, University of Bedfordshire. Her research interests include alchemy, food, science and the pseudo-sciences in literature from the early modern period to the 19^th century. She is general editor of John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, 5 vols (OUP, 2014), and has edited two essay collections, The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (OUP, 2007) and The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (MUP, 2010).

Richard Marggraf Turley is Professor of English Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University, and he is the University’s Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination. He is the author of several monographs and articles on Romanticism, including Keats’s Boyish Imagination (Routledge, 2004) and Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2009). He is also the author of a novel set in the Romantic period, The Cunning House (Sandstone, 2015).

Howard Thomas (Sid) is Emeritus Professor of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth University and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. He has held visiting professorships at universities in Switzerland and the United States. His research interests include the genetics, evolution and uses of food plants. He also has a special interest in the cultural significance of scientific research and promotion of links between science and the arts. He is co-author of The Molecular Life of Plants (Wiley/ASPB, 2013)

Over the course of many subsequent rounds of coffee (and not a few buns), we developed a novel line of argument concerning Shakespeare’s intentions for the dramatic form and substance of ‘King Lear’. We did it by close reading of primary written sources and analyses of their historical and socio-economic contexts, in combination with insights from contemporary plant science and agri-environmental research. The fruits of this exercise in transdisciplinary cross-pollination include a growing number of academic publications, presentations at several conferences and public events and a flood of media interest, culminating in a forthcoming book that brings it all together – of which, more later.

The original King Lear brain dump – November 2007

The successful assault on ‘King Lear’ convinced us that our collaboration had developed an approach, a kind of analytical toolkit, that potentially could be applied to other works in the literary canon: as we describe in subsequent blogs.

Publications on Shakespeare:

JE Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2013. Reading with the Grain: Sustainability and the Literary Imagination. INSPIRE-ASLE-UKI Essay Competition Winner (the prize was the opportunity to deliver the INSPIRE-ASLE-UKI lecture at the 2013 Hay-on-Wye Festival – here’s a video of the event)

H Thomas. 2013. ‘Cultivating Common Ground’: a participant’s perspective. In: R Crossland. Cultivating common ground: interdisciplinary approaches to biological research. New Phytologist 197: 362-365

JE Archer, H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley. 2012. The Autumn King: remembering the land in King Lear. Shakespeare Quarterly 63: 518-543

H Thomas, J Archer, R Marggraf Turley. 2011. Evolution, physiology and phytochemistry of the psychotoxic arable mimic weed darnel (Lolium temulentum L). Progress in Botany 72: 73-104

R  Marggraf Turley, H Thomas, J E Archer. 2010. A tragedy of idle weeds. Times Literary Supplement No. 5577 (19 February 2010) pp 14-15